That’s true of protein coding sequence, but things are a little bit more difficult for regulatory DNA because
1)Regulatory DNA is under MUCH less sequence constraint—the relevant binding proteins are not individually fussy about their binding sites
2)Regulatory Networks have a lot of redundancy
3)Regulatory Mutations can be much more easily compensated for by other mutations—because we’re dealing with analog networks, rather than strings of amino acids.
Regulatory evolution is an immature field but it seems that an awful lot of change can occur in a short time. The literature is full of sequences that have an experimentally provable activity (put them on a plasmid with a reporter gene and off it goes) and yet show no conservation between species. There’s probably a lot more functional sequence that won’t just work on it’s own on a plasmid, or show a noticable effect from knockouts. It may be that regulatory networks are composed of a continous distribution from a few constrained elements with strong effects down to lots of unconstrained weak ones. The latter will be very, very difficult to distinguish from Junk DNA.
Data with lots of redundancy does, in a certain sense, contain a lot of junk. Junk that, although it helps reliably transmit the data, doesn’t change the meaning of the data (or doesn’t change it by much).
That’s true of protein coding sequence, but things are a little bit more difficult for regulatory DNA because
1)Regulatory DNA is under MUCH less sequence constraint—the relevant binding proteins are not individually fussy about their binding sites
2)Regulatory Networks have a lot of redundancy
3)Regulatory Mutations can be much more easily compensated for by other mutations—because we’re dealing with analog networks, rather than strings of amino acids.
Regulatory evolution is an immature field but it seems that an awful lot of change can occur in a short time. The literature is full of sequences that have an experimentally provable activity (put them on a plasmid with a reporter gene and off it goes) and yet show no conservation between species. There’s probably a lot more functional sequence that won’t just work on it’s own on a plasmid, or show a noticable effect from knockouts. It may be that regulatory networks are composed of a continous distribution from a few constrained elements with strong effects down to lots of unconstrained weak ones. The latter will be very, very difficult to distinguish from Junk DNA.
Data with lots of redundancy does, in a certain sense, contain a lot of junk. Junk that, although it helps reliably transmit the data, doesn’t change the meaning of the data (or doesn’t change it by much).
Yeah. What’s relevant to this discussion is complexity, not number of base pairs.